Pundit accountability watch: Biden quits edition

Will their reputations suffer if he doesn't leave?

I think it’s important to hold pundits — which is to say, professional current affairs commentators (who may or may not be journalists) — accountable for their accuracy.

A while ago I created two pretty extensive timelines of pundit narratives, one about Donald Trump’s first year in office, the other about the 2020 presidential election campaign. They document plenty of sensible takes and insightful analysis — even some strikingly spot-on predictions.

There’s also a lot of duds, however, including:

• Michael Moore saying Trump would not serve a full four years in office.

• Frank Rich predicting the firing of James Comey would mark the “beginning of the end” of the Trump administration.

• Ben Domenech expecting Trump to make a hard pivot to the center on policy and have a better relationship with Chuck Schumer than Mitch McConnell.

• Steve Bannon declaring Hillary Clinton would enter the 2020 Democratic primaries.

• Kyle Smith at National Review saying sexual harassment allegations against Joe Biden would “doom” his attempts to win the Democratic primary.

• Carl Beijer in Jacobin flatly asserting that Biden cannot beat Trump.

I wish I had made a similar timeline for this election, given we’re currently in the midst of a maelstrom of pundits speaking with even greater — and more unified — certainty than I ever recall seeing in 2017 or 2020. It cries for accountability, so I’m making this post (which I may add to) as something to refer back to in a couple months or years in order to review just how rational all this confidence was, in retrospect.

To wit, in the aftermath of President Biden’s doddering debate performance on June 27, it quickly became the overwhelming consensus of the (mostly progressive) American punditocracy that Biden was unfit to continue his re-election campaign — if not continue serving as president altogether. For Biden to prolong his run in spite of his obvious and unattractive physical and cognitive decline was to concede the election to Donald Trump.

This conclusion is considered so self-evident it’s often said Biden must believe it himself, and will surely step down any day now as a result.

I was initially receptive to these takes because I agreed Biden’s debate performance was bad. I was sympathetic to the idea that if it was indeed the consensus view that Biden was unfit and a liability to the Democratic Party ticket, it would be appropriate for him to step down. I don’t want Trump to win, and I am willing to defer to the judgement of the consensus.

However, in the days that followed it quickly became apparent that no real consensus on this question actually existed, outside of the pundit subculture. Biden has stated repeatedly and unequivocally that he plans to continue his campaign, and top Democrats in Congress and other elected offices have endorsed him staying put as well. Logistical concerns about money and laws have been raised in response to the idea of swapping out a candidate so late in the game, and there are worries about the inter-party division that could be inflamed by appointing a new party head.

Nevertheless, the pundits are confident.

Among the big names who have declared Biden must go, we have Thomas Friedman, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Nicholas Kristof, Jonathan Chait, Peggy Noonan, Maureen Dowd, David Axelrod, Mark Leibovich, David Remnick, Paul Krugman, Ramesh Ponnuru, William Kristol, Sam Harris, and George Clooney.

We also got a few in the “it’s-just-a-matter-of-time” camp:

• “I think Biden will bow out, his current protestations notwithstanding.”
  — Ross Douthat, July 6, 2024

• “At some point in the next two weeks, President Biden will almost certainly announce that he is no longer running for reelection.”
  — Jonathan V. Last, July 8, 2024

• “Mark my words: Joe Biden is going to be out of the 2024 presidential race.”
  — James Carville, July 8, 2024

• “The issue with President Biden isn’t if — it’s who, because he is not going to be the Democrats' candidate for president in 2024.”
  — Bill Maher, July 12, 2024

It all feels like a major inflection point for the opinion-having industry.

If Biden does, in fact, step down, the pundits will have played a critical role in helping manifest that outcome. They chose to discuss little else in the weeks following the debate, and insisted the viability of Biden’s candidacy was the question the American political process had to drop everything and resolve (and they helpfully offered the solution). If he goes, they will have proven that a unified barrage of columns and media appearances can, in fact, alter the course of American democracy through the blunt force of publicly-expressed opinions.

If Biden does not step down, by contrast, there are two possibilities.

If Biden hangs on and loses to Trump in November — and especially if he looks increasingly pathetic in the lead-up to it — he will likely become a reviled figure of conventional wisdom in relatively short order. Having reached consensus that Biden is an obstacle to the goal of keeping an even worse candidate out of the Oval Office, the pundits will feel extremely validated should that wind up happening. Biden’s stubbornness will become one of the great canonical crimes of America’s presidents. He will be an inseparable part of the story of Trump’s return, and whatever horrors are inflicted by that. It will be a traditional “history written by the winners” type situation — quite literally in this case, because the winners will be those whose writings play a powerful role directing memories of American events.

If Biden wins, however, it should deal a massive blow to pundit credibility. The president will have succeeded at the job they declared him incapable of doing, while they will have failed at theirs — understanding politics. It would be a professional injury akin to the one dealt to election pollsters and modelers following Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, though the legacy of that was probably a bit milder given it’s not clear even Trump himself saw his win coming. A Biden win would be more devastating given how many of the pundits calling for his resignation are themselves Democrats; it’s one thing for liberal pundits to misread the popularity of a Republican candidate, but quite another for them to misunderstand what makes a Democrat electable.

I could imagine a scenario in which this fissure over trust and strategy alienates the political side of America’s progressive coalition from its purported intelligentsia, with the “self-important podcasters” seen as more expendable and ignorable than ever. Democrats could grow more openly hostile to the “mainstream media” in a way that’s been stereotypically associated with Republicans, concluding, in similar fashion, that the press simply doesn’t have their best interests at heart. The pundits could respond in kind by doubling-down on skepticism and criticism of the second Biden administration, which could become quite toxic if a re-elected Biden becomes credibly accused of being too infirm to perform his duties, and the White House brushes it off as more ignorant squawking from a dopey clique of pompous know-it-alls who get everything wrong.